Obama's digital man, Joe Rospars

Linda Mottram started off by playing Joe Rospars a popular song based on the popular slogan, a viral hit from 2008.

The beauty of the song is that is wasn't made by the campaign team but that it was content that came from the supporters.

Digital is not just a platform for content, "it's also a platform for the relationships you can build with your supporters" said Rospars.

Back in early 2008 it was not expected that anyone would challenge Hillary Clinton to run for President within the Democrats but when Barrack Obama decided he was entering the race, digital strategy became very important.

"We had a unique strategic challenge that was to build a network of relationships with supporters and grass roots donors and people around the country, very very fast, from scratch. Naturally that meant we had to do it for digital" said Rospars.

Building up the network of supporters in the digital space is something that allows for an interesting focus on just how the relationships with supporters are defined;

"It's about content but it's also about the actions people take, how we connect them with each other and how they decide to feel about their role in the campaign" said Rospars.

Changing these relationships is particularly challenging in spontaneous situations for organisations and brands.

"The interesting part is what organisations can do to marshal and bring people in. To make an organisation and its mission and its brand a little less controlled and a little less organised than it otherwise might be. That's a challenge for NGO's, charity, cultural organisations, and brands, that might want to open up and have deeper relationships with people" said Rospars.

After the success of 2008's digital strategy, the Republicans had time and money to respond and formulate their digital strategy. Rospars offers this assessment of their 2012 strategy:

"They spent a lot of money and time, and spent a lot of time talking to reporters about what a great job they were doing but I think what they lacked was the sense of purpose that we had to it. We genuinely believed that this had to be at the centre of our campaign.. digital yes, but more so, ordinary people chipping in $5 or $10 at a time doing the work of building relationships with their neighbours. To do the work to make an election happen. That was our only path to victory."

The tactic of spending big on a digital campaign is not always the best idea:

"The Romney folk thought they could raise a bunch of seven and eight figure checks and blast their opponents out of the water, as they had in the primary. It's not a strategy without merit it's just, sort of, not that fun. It makes me not want to be involved in politics if that's what politics is" said Rospars.

Finding and developing a voice for the campaign is vital, as well as realising the importance of the two way conversation you can have with voters.

"Politicians have always had their own voice and been creating content. It's just its always been one way content and frequently ,actually, pretty boring content.

So the digital strategy is an opportunity to create lots of different content, lots of different formats but also, most importantly to be part of a two way conversation with voters.

The conversation whether it is in social media or with your own supporters, if it is open and inclusive in that way, the arc of that conversation bends towards accountability and candour. And not spin."